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Category: Family, Parenting & Pets

The 10 People You’ll Find at Book Fair

The Dusty Parachute by Susanne Kerns 19 Comments

It’s Book Fair time again!

Even kids who haven’t willingly opened a book the entire school year completely lose their minds over Book Fair.

And who wouldn’t when the decorating committee transforms their simple library into some magical land, like a medieval castle or an undersea experience, complete with a bubble machine at the entrance.

Even if you’ve missed the Book Fair reminder notes in your kid’s folder or all the giant red banners around campus, it’s hard to miss the kids wandering around after school dressed as human billboards ringing bells and spreading the news about the Book Fair.

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Parenting & Other Natual Disasters

Parenting And Other Natural Disasters

The Dusty Parachute by Susanne Kerns 11 Comments

There’s never a particularly good time to experience your first earthquake. I can, however, tell you one of the worst times: November 1983, a week after being traumatized for life by watching the ABC Made for TV Movie, “The Day After” (insert mental image of a mushroom cloud and decimated city here.)

For an 11-year-old kid who spent each waking moment after watching that movie convinced that the sound of every airplane would be shortly followed by a nuclear detonation, an earthquake could only mean one thing: the end of the world.

And for about 30 seconds that November morning, it was.

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Apologies I Owe My Mom - The Scooter

Apologies I Owe My Mom – The Scooter

The Dusty Parachute by Susanne Kerns 12 Comments

As a mother, there are plenty of thing to keep you up at night worrying: Are the kids getting good grades? Do they ever get bullied? Do I push them too much? (Or not push them enough and they’ll end up living in my house forever?)

But the thing that worries me most is knowing that even if you do everything right and have a really good kid, there will come a day when they surprise you by making a stupid decision that you never saw coming.

At least that’s what I did to my mom.
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Nose Frida The Snot Sucker

I Suck Snot and So Should You

The Dusty Parachute by Susanne Kerns 11 Comments

As the mothers of newborns we do some pretty strange things to keep our babies healthy & comfortable:

Would you use your teeth to trim your baby’s fingernails? Anything for my baby!

Would you squirt your breast milk into your baby’s eye at the first sign of conjunctivitis? You’d be crazy not to!

Would you suck snot out of your baby’s nose with a plastic hose? Of cour…..Wait a minute…..you want me to do what?

My name is Susanne, and I sucked my baby’s snot…..and you should too!
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Thank You! But No ‘Thank You’

The Dusty Parachute by Susanne Kerns 13 Comments

This week I have made some good progress in distributing five of the remaining ten thank you cards that my daughter wrote for her birthday gifts….in July….2014…..almost 10 months ago.

I wish I could blame my daughter, but I can’t. See, we made this great rule for her birthday this year: She couldn’t open her next present until she had written a Thank You card for the last one she opened. She was done with her cards the day of her party, yet, as of April 2015, over half of them still remain undelivered (even to friends who live two doors down and that we see almost every day.)
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I’m Going to Be in a Book! Martinis & Motherhood – Tales of Wonder, Woe & WTF?!

The Dusty Parachute by Susanne Kerns 7 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I received the exciting news that one of my stories was selected to be included in the upcoming anthology, Martinis & Motherhood – Tales of Wonder, Woe & WTF?! which is being published in June by Shannon Day (Martinis & Motherhood) and Tara Wilson (Don’t Lick the Deck) of Tipsy Squirrel Press.
martinis motherhood cover

I’m so excited and honored to have my story included along with 35 other talented authors sharing their stories of the Wonder, Woe & WTF moments of motherhood (and of course, martini recipes.) Read more about the book here.
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Why I Don’t Put Pictures of My Kids on My Blog

The Dusty Parachute by Susanne Kerns 18 Comments

I often get asked why I don’t post picture of my kids in my blog posts or on social media for The Dusty Parachute.

It’s hard not to.  They are both adorable and do insanely cute and crazy things about 10 time each hour.  So why not share this cuteness with the world?

There are several reasons, but the biggest reason is that about two years ago, when my daughter was 7, she walked up behind me as I was posting a picture of her on Facebook and asked “Why is that picture of me on the computer?  Shouldn’t I get to decide what happens to my pictures?”

I was floored.  She was right.
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Shut the F*ck Up – A Poem for Clueless Parents

The Dusty Parachute by Susanne Kerns 35 Comments

The other day I was at a restaurant with my kids and couldn’t help but overhear some moms at the next table carrying on about a friend (who was not present) who had apparently made some pretty interesting decisions in her life recently.

All of the friends were wide eyed, on the edge of their seats waiting for the next juicy detail. You know who else was listening to every word of her thorough news report (besides me)? The woman’s six year old daughter who was waiting for her to shut up for one second to she could get an escort to the bathroom.
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Top 14 Reasons Preschool Boys are Like Drunk Old Men

The Dusty Parachute by Susanne Kerns 11 Comments

When my daughter (now nine) was around four or five years old, every once in a while she would enter a special kind of state of mind that we fondly referred to as “drunk college roommate.”

99% of the time “drunk college roommate” showed up at bedtime, primarily when it was time to put pajamas on. It would start innocently enough with her telling a little silly joke and then proceeding to laugh so hard that she could fall down, in various stages of pajama undress. Then she would attempt to stand up and steady herself and get all serious, stare deep into my eyes and while patting down both sides of my hair with her tiny hands say things like, “Momma…you’re sooooo pretty.” (All of this, of course, with only one leg of her pajamas on.)
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